Deanna Hoak

Blaine, my lovely nine-year-old, did a photo shoot for me when she got home from book-making camp today. (Scans from her book to follow, since I have her full permission. ;-))
I don’t know which I’ll substitute as my bio photo yet. Maybe I’ll actually try some without my belly showing. It looks to me like [...]

And damn, it feels like a weird birthday.
I’ve also decided the hot pic on my Bio page is officially too old to use in good sense and will have my nine-year-old attempt to take a new one tonight. (She took the current one and did a good job, so I have named her my official [...]

I bought the twentieth-anniversary edition of The Princess Bride and watched it with my kids this week, successfully introducing them to an integral aspect of geek culture.
And it took! (At least with my son–my daughter rightfully thought Princess Buttercup was useless.) Herewith my son doing an exceptionally cute Inigo Montoya. :-)
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Family movies are generally the only ones I go to see, and I don’t usually find them interesting enough to post about. We saw Kung Fu Panda last week, for instance, and I found it completely lacking in depth or characterization, which doesn’t have to be the case with movies made for kids. If you [...]

I got a wonderfully nice letter from Allen Steele today. He noted that he had accepted China Miéville’s Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Un Lun Dun for him at the Locus Awards this year, and he sent me along a copy of what China asked him to read, since it mentioned me [...]

The clouds are so often gorgeous here in Florida. We had a fire-breathing dragon in our skies this week:

He even had a mate:

Aren’t they lovely?

Well, it’s traditional ever since I made it for Bill a few years ago and it immediately became his favorite food I’ve ever made.

It’s a six-egg omelette with a pound of ribeye steak, half a pound of baby bella mushrooms, a whole bunch of cheddar, and some onion and garlic thrown in for good measure.
I [...]

My daughter and I were waiting for my son to finish up a horseback lesson recently when a boy from the stables wandered over and clearly started checking her out.
I remarked upon it when the boy left, and she rolled her eyes: “I saw him.”
“You might as well get used to it,” I said. “You’re [...]

Right here. I came across it in a People magazine while waiting at the dentist’s office today and had to look it up online.
That’s…um…Well. “Go meat” indeed.
The placement of that sausage she’s putting the tongs to? And the top grill line on it? And the tiny shadow at the tip? Really. I’m astounded it doesn’t [...]

If you’re tired of the oyster porn, please move along. I don’t even have any pictures of the oysters topless, alas.
However, since it was clear that my little family and I could not eat these oysters alone, I invited over a neighbor and her kids tonight; we both shucked about an hour (this is a [...]